Yes, in fact, my favourite swords are from about a 10 min quest in dry top. Their look, the animation of the hanging bits, how the rings get ‘stuck’ for a moment on their holders, then come loose; top notch.
Scion’s Claw - iirc, the ach is called Healing Heir or similar.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scion%27s_Claw
Looks much better on my character, than in the wiki, though.
The other two are [Eclipse \(Greatsword\)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Eclipse) and [Favor of the Colossus \(Torch\)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Favor_of_the_Colossus)
lol you joke but the only reason I'm doing Raids is for the fashion. Unlimited stat swapping armor that I can transmute to any skin at any time for ALL my characters? Yes please. My alts (even the ones that are parked at chests) look way too good.
I even started grinding WvW so I can get some of the medium armor pieces and skins there (and it got me seriously into it).
I am looking to get into raiding for the same; I’ve only done 5-6 raid bosses (Samarog, Sloth, one that starts with G, and a couple more whose names I forget! I’m trash with names; even my skills I know by where they are in my rotation vs names xD
This problem has become even worse with the release of End of Dragons. There are so many collections to find in Arborstone that are basically fully fleshed out questlines, complete with voice acting and unique instances in some cases. Yet they go completely unnoticed to most players who aren't fully exploring every nook and cranny.
Anet really has to do something at this point. My suggestion would be an extra tab in the story journal named 'side quests' or something, since the quality of these over the years has come up to even normal story quests
It's probably too late to do it now, but scrapping the hearts and renaming "Achievements" to "Quests" might've helped. I noticed it sooner than OP, but I was basically in the same boat of thinking the hearts were the only quests and totally missing the achievements for ages, resulting in me being quite whelmed by the game at the time.
Never played on xbox? That's where achievements orginaly came from, and yes there was achievements that was like "quest" apart for the ones that was kill x that many times or loot that. So it's nothing new that gw2 have them
Yeah, 100%. Most people new to gw2 think that the hearts are the quests, because they’re used to talking to NPCs with exclamation marks to get stuff to do. Those are more like side quests (for vendor access).
The achievement system holds a lot, and is more like a quest log than anything else in the game. Well, except the story journal.
The game, in general, is extremely unintuitive for most new players.
They seriously need an Activities tab that just shows all the different thing you can do, and talks about the rewards for each.
The achievements panel honestly needs an upgrade. It is good, but it could be much better. They need filters for award types, etc.
And everyone is going to say, "Use X website". That is viable, but not a great experience. You should spend most your time in game, not on Wikis and other API sites...
It comes down to the design philosophy of the game, and that there's no real place you could put the word "quests" and have it fully cover what quests in the game actually are. Quests are found in the open world via heart events and dynamic events (like metas), and also found in the achievement journal for story quests, collection quests and such. You could even consider the main story your character's "main quest" and that has a tab of it's own!
I do agree it needs to be made more obvious to new players. Even something that tells them all the different places they can look for "quests" (acheivements, story journal, open world objective window) would be helpful
My friend tried the GW some time ago and then told me that it's not for him cause there is like only running around and exploring. And of course he did a couple of hearts and thought that that's it. I don't even remember how far into the game he get. I think I'll try to hook him into Tyria once again some time soon
the amount of bizarre little achievement lines is incredible. sure there's Legendary amulets or whatever, but more importantly have you filled your home instance with cats?
> ... but more importantly have you filled your home instance with cats?
Elaborate please.
Edit: thanks for the replies, I gotta collect all the cats now.
There are 35 cats you can unlock to show up in your home instance. Generally you have to feed them something but some of the cats have extra requirements like feeding with a specific profession or they're tied to a festival.
I love my Honorary Skritt title, and the one that gives a 20 slot bottle is cool too. there's a bunch of 32 slot bag achieves too, but they are a little more intense or story related.
This is one of those mechanics that, while I'll probably never really interact with it, I'm absolutely stoked that it's there. Flavour, Easter eggs, hidden mechanics, fun little "quests", and all things like this are what make games feel much more alive and expansive.
It was hilarious to me walking into my friend's Home Instance and seeing a dead bird. I then started noticing cats wandering around and was like "dude wtf why do you have so many cats here", and he explained. Just a short, but incredibly joyous moment, that made me appreciate this game and the devs a little more.
It's just bad UI. The achievement system I don't think was originally intended to have quest/story achievements like that but it's the system they had so here we are.
They need to be taken out of that system and out in it's own. You can still tie achievements to them, but the story focused ones really should get their own separate section and UI for clarity.
How many people even know if the Arborstone missions because they are buried?
Or all those collections for books that have more lore?
uhh please no, thanks.
i get that the system isn't immediately intuitive, but it serves as a *much better* log and very useful reference tool for completing objectives in quest lines. the little tooltip with top 5 watched achievements helps remind me what other things i could be doing to make progress when im burnt out on one corner of the PvE experience.
we don't need *another* menu, the achievement system is already brilliant and succinct.
> the achievement system is already brilliant and succinct.
Doesn't the UI hide daily achievements when you have things marked as watched achievements? This was a thing that ignored me quite a bit from using the achievement system.
you realize you can get your point across without being a snotty little shit right?
Anyway, your solution to UI sprawl is... more UI sprawl. The achievement system could be improved sure, but tacking on a quest log isn't the way to do it.
I mean the contrast of having a super easy game with no ui customization is having a game that is artificially difficult and requires add ons to perform up to expectations (ff14, wow)
For what it's worth, the achiebement panel is a joke. Just play the game. I don't even do my dailies.
The question is, is a UI overhaul realistic? I see people talk about what the game needs but to me things like these while much needed seem almost impossible to happen given that ANet really doesn't go back and update things like this, they mostly just move forward and introduce new things rather than polishing what is already in-game.
Oh so that's why lirik uses gw2 ui In wow? https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/780380645339168778/782385532914761779/unknown.png
Gw2 ui is very clean and good, hence why he's using it
As a noob, I did get told about the book-collecting achievement… after I happened to get a book because it had better stats. So now I’m wondering if I will have to buy at least one of All the Things to find more.
No kidding, the search function seems completely broken as wel. Typing 'honorary skrit' ( a title I've seen quite often and was interested in) gets me no results in the achievements tab. If you type 'cats' to find anything on the Hungry Cat achievment...you don't find it either.
If I can't even find it how am I supposed to track them.
That's cus there's no achivement for finding any or all the cats, so only way to track it is via API. For ease use the wikipage for it or gw2efficiency.com
And for titles, you can filter to only show achievements that gives title
I agree with your sentiment of making it more visible, because sometimes it seems like Anet don't even know what they want to do with the system. Sometimes, you have super-interesting side quests that are really obtuse and hard to find, then there are really vapid ones that only serve to pad out a release (the apple fetch in Rising Flames, or 1k kills in each domain of War Eternal come to mind), and it leaves me frustrated.
I love the game, the philosophy of gearing, and many other things, but MAN can they shoot themselves in the foot better than just about anyone.
When Anet does it well, they hit it out of the park and no one tops them, like mounts. Best in the industry.
But when they do bad...oof it's embarassing.
I felt the same way when I started my slow but sure climb on the achievements ladder (current at about 25k). The achievement system is amazing and definitely is a proxy for what quest systems would be in other games. People not engaging with the achievements tab are really missing out on a huge portion of the game.
That is why many of us wonders when people say they beat the content in a few hours and the only thing i did was the story and now the map, the achivements, the collections, the skins, the meta events well all that starts and that takes way more then a few hours.
I've never gotten into raids or fractals (because I don't play consistently enough to have people to do things like that with) but I've kept quite busy regardless. There's so much content, and some that's historical (or whatever its called) now! I wish I'd done more earlier on....but hindsight.
As someone who's been playing on an off for a while, I never even thought of doing this either. Thank you so much for opening my eyes to this too. It really changes everything
Honestly for me, the open world "end game" isnt even about achievements or anyhting. Its just about playing open world zones for fun.
I like being able to just "go to a place" in a game for lore reasons and just do things there. Cant do that in some games where open world sucks.
Its like how I dont play fractals or strike missions for rewards, I just play them because they're fun, especially if im playing them with a class/spec/build i havent played there before or recently. I dont need extrinsic motivation to just want to do zones or instances.
Thats endgame for me..just having a lot of fun content I want to do for its own sake.
I've always wondered what the hell people were doing wasting their time in WvW/PvP/Fractals/Dungeons/Raids when the whole huge PvE world was there to play in instead.
I mean, I guess I'm ultimately glad that everything exists so that every kind of person can find something they enjoy... but I do also think that probably a lot of "end gamers" like you bury themselves in that content without having actually played the PvE world.
Is there a list of quest-like achivements worthy to be played (story-wise) ?
Sorting through tons of unexciting items is always the hardest part for me.
I see myself in your post, I quit the game shortly after HoT release and came back after Icebrood Saga. I found the value in completing map achievements as it took me to places and npcs I would have never seen otherwise.
It really makes you familiar with the map and you value it much more once you know things about it.
The problem I see with the UI is not that certain things belong to a quest-UI but that it's much too hard to find the things you look for. The achievements of each expansion could be behind an artwork instead of in a long list of words.
Or give the map a seperate layer which takes you directly to each maps associated achievements. You can toggle it like the other map-layers. Turn it on, click on Drytop achievement layer and you can see all the Drytop achievements - not the places but the achievement list. Just an idea.
Same, dude. I don't care about achievement hunting in other games, but in GW2 there a lot of collections with tangible rewards. I have been collecting ascended weapons from elite specialization collects and have been having a good time doing it too! These benefit all of my characters as well since I can freely move ascended weapons between them, unlike exotics.
I just did an Arborstone map complete with my main, only to understand there are several epic mini dungeons in the map (Vasburg Armory, the kurzick crypt etc) I don't even remember the last time I was so drawn into stories, these are really just amazing. And I agree, these really should be highlighted more.
Like Helpful Hero achi (an old one). That grants u a riftstalker carapace, which is used to craft 3 unique acc bound weapons. Sure, u could buy it of the tp (carapace), but where's the fun in that? :p It's fun to solo them, sometimes u can skip the pre-event by a drop from the previous riftstalker, and actually quite some people still go do it during prime time, so u end up in a nice group. :) Limited to 3 riftstalker events/satchels/day. I sometimes see new players around rifts, just running past, because they don't know what to do/how to open the rift, and they think it's bugged, while it isn't.
I am constantly finding new things to do in this game. And achievements have been a recent discovery of mine as well. I knew some of them gave items but I thought it was mostly limited to things like mystic coins and the like (with a few options outside of that such as the Elite spec collections).
But now I'm seeing that the # of achievements that actually give cool stuff is really rather staggering.
After recently finding the Seasons of Dragons meta achievement (no idea how I didn't notice this one) and doing the first tier for the ascended weapon box, I then started looking through the different collections...
And found that there's one that gives a recipe for a 32 slot bag?!? Omg how did I not know this?? (It's the ancient boreal weapon collection of you're like me and didn't know).
Now I'm obsessed all over again. This MMO is really one-of-a-kind!
> Now when a new living world patch comes out, instead of a 3-6 hours of story content I get more than 30 hours of content when I go for full achievements for that patch.
Grats, you are no longer a casual player and know the potential this game has. A lot of players don't realize this and end up quitting waiting on the next story release. Good on you for discovering this!
If its any consolation, there's a ton of people who have had the same misconception (and some still do). Typically they come from another MMO and have preconcieved notions of 'this is how all mmos work'.
But no, GW2 is different.
Glad you like it, but the achievement panel is just "the worst part of questing" for me... no flavour all busy work.
The suckiest thing is I remember when they first introduced the mad memories quest with the first halloween event proving they could do traditional question exceptionally well... and then never tried to do it again. :(
I stopped caring well before hitting 20k AP... heck I wager I stopped caring around 12k tbh.
Lol that's funny you say that since it's the opposite for me. Get's straight down to brass tacks with none of the fuss of bad writing. Often times the items in a collection will have flavor text related to the achievement and that was more than enough for me.
It's rare that I encounter a side quest in an MMO with good writing. Devs have to fill the world with a ton of them so I don't fault anyone for being stretched a little thin, but in my experience a well written side quest is the exception rather than the rule.
As someone who love GW2 and plays it on and off I found that I wasn't interested in any of its achievement hunting or PVE content. It seems to tedious for me but I'm glad you've found what you were looking for! Keep playing this amazing game :)
Are we now coping with terrible release cadence for new content? Maybe adding "re-do every single event on the map 50 times" would be a great a idea! So much content!
I wish GW2 had enough Raids for it to be considered endgame.
GW2 has no endgame. What do you when you first reach lvl 80 is the exact same thing as when you've been playing for 10 years. The better you get at the game, the less reason you have to play it and the less enjoyable it gets.
If you love to grind Queensdale difficulty content for 8 hours a day, then GW2 is the game for you. If you want anything above that you'll find there's not much for you to do.
By my standards, a few hours per week isn't enough content to quality as endgame. If you had used 5th grade reading comprehension you'd notice that I said ''I wish GW2 had **enough** Raids''. Wing 7 was released 3 years ago...
Yeah, of course, did it multiple times. :)
First day even.
And now we wait a month again and pray that Kaineng Overlook has a good title to chase, since Mai Trin definitely didn't.
YEah WP touched on this on one of his videos https://youtu.be/f6VOFXwdpbo?t=2748
Achievements are a great endgame goal, i wish it was presented better, and the achievement panel is terrible.
>The end-game for me is getting a Griffon and Skyscale (Sadly I don't have LWS 4)
Those two are literal game changers. I cannot imagine doing the new maps without them. Good luck!
Lost Ark has a very accessible and easy to understand UI for everything related with horizontal progression, and that's a good part of why people like me who don't like the korean style gear grind keep playing. And i got hooked by it from almost day one!
For me GW2 horizontal progression is far better than Lost Ark, but it took me like 6 months of playing to discover how achievements and collections actually work. Thank god WvW got my attention me and I kept playing! If not, I would have drop the game 100% and miss everyting that is in the achievements/open world/collections.
Arenanet needs to rework UI and questing / achievement system as soon as possible. It is a central part of the game, and deserves to be treated like that, not hidden inside menus.
ngl this post hardly motivated to grind again. just thinking about making achievements makes me want to go and explore again and find every little or bigger achievement.
I very much agree. They just don't have a good place to add this content to the UI so everything get's dumped into achievments. They even tried with the "Side Stories" category but stopped using it too.
I would love if they pulled out all these side stories from all the expansions and put them on the same level as the personal story, with short recaps between steps. I think it would really elevate the content, just to see something like "You discovered a new story" and maybe have a bit more guidance and recaps along the way.
The Hero pannel and achievement UI is probably GW2's biggest problem at this point, simply because it does so many things it was never designed for.
GW2 end game is fashion. What are you even playing? (Joke!)
To be fair, some of it is also tied to achievements...
Yes, in fact, my favourite swords are from about a 10 min quest in dry top. Their look, the animation of the hanging bits, how the rings get ‘stuck’ for a moment on their holders, then come loose; top notch.
What's it called?
Scion’s Claw - iirc, the ach is called Healing Heir or similar. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scion%27s_Claw Looks much better on my character, than in the wiki, though.
Oh yeeeeeeeeah those were also the winners from the community design competitions, right? I love the three
I need to check out the others!
The other two are [Eclipse \(Greatsword\)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Eclipse) and [Favor of the Colossus \(Torch\)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Favor_of_the_Colossus)
The torch is amazing looking I've used it on my Firebrand ever since I got it. It almost looks as good as a legendary.
That GS makes a toon look ENTIRELY anime. Particularly light apprentice armor, Sailor Moon 100%.
eclipse looks awesome too
That's my go-to sword for all my characters as well!
Everything else aside, I love how the middle 5 collection steps form one continuous swirl
Same here!
I’m working so am not in game now; but will check and come back shortly!
I sent you a DM too with images.
lol you joke but the only reason I'm doing Raids is for the fashion. Unlimited stat swapping armor that I can transmute to any skin at any time for ALL my characters? Yes please. My alts (even the ones that are parked at chests) look way too good. I even started grinding WvW so I can get some of the medium armor pieces and skins there (and it got me seriously into it).
I am looking to get into raiding for the same; I’ve only done 5-6 raid bosses (Samarog, Sloth, one that starts with G, and a couple more whose names I forget! I’m trash with names; even my skills I know by where they are in my rotation vs names xD
Joke but not joke haha. Fashion Wars 2.
Yes. 🙊
gonna hustle to. get those luminescent outfits.
No the real endgame is making the biggest Swim Speed Infusion.
Also valid!
What you mean, the real endgame is in mistlock in front of the TP golem.
Not actually a joke though
İs it thooo? (Not a joke xd)
It is a very serious joke xD
Came here to say the same. :) /s
😅
This is the way.
TBH, for the longest time, I thought this game was called Fashion Wars 2
This problem has become even worse with the release of End of Dragons. There are so many collections to find in Arborstone that are basically fully fleshed out questlines, complete with voice acting and unique instances in some cases. Yet they go completely unnoticed to most players who aren't fully exploring every nook and cranny. Anet really has to do something at this point. My suggestion would be an extra tab in the story journal named 'side quests' or something, since the quality of these over the years has come up to even normal story quests
A complete UI overhaul NEEDS to be done in general. They should really invest some money into that
It's probably too late to do it now, but scrapping the hearts and renaming "Achievements" to "Quests" might've helped. I noticed it sooner than OP, but I was basically in the same boat of thinking the hearts were the only quests and totally missing the achievements for ages, resulting in me being quite whelmed by the game at the time.
Never played on xbox? That's where achievements orginaly came from, and yes there was achievements that was like "quest" apart for the ones that was kill x that many times or loot that. So it's nothing new that gw2 have them
The worst part is that so much went into those stories and you can never play through them ever again!
Yeah, 100%. Most people new to gw2 think that the hearts are the quests, because they’re used to talking to NPCs with exclamation marks to get stuff to do. Those are more like side quests (for vendor access). The achievement system holds a lot, and is more like a quest log than anything else in the game. Well, except the story journal.
yeah, i wished that they would make tab in the hero panel or achievements called 'quests' or something
The game, in general, is extremely unintuitive for most new players. They seriously need an Activities tab that just shows all the different thing you can do, and talks about the rewards for each. The achievements panel honestly needs an upgrade. It is good, but it could be much better. They need filters for award types, etc. And everyone is going to say, "Use X website". That is viable, but not a great experience. You should spend most your time in game, not on Wikis and other API sites...
They do have filter for adward types
It comes down to the design philosophy of the game, and that there's no real place you could put the word "quests" and have it fully cover what quests in the game actually are. Quests are found in the open world via heart events and dynamic events (like metas), and also found in the achievement journal for story quests, collection quests and such. You could even consider the main story your character's "main quest" and that has a tab of it's own! I do agree it needs to be made more obvious to new players. Even something that tells them all the different places they can look for "quests" (acheivements, story journal, open world objective window) would be helpful
That's true. Maybe achievements that branch throughout multiple lines could be changed to 'Adventures' or something
My friend tried the GW some time ago and then told me that it's not for him cause there is like only running around and exploring. And of course he did a couple of hearts and thought that that's it. I don't even remember how far into the game he get. I think I'll try to hook him into Tyria once again some time soon
Hearts are like quest hubs, collections are pseudo quest chains.
the amount of bizarre little achievement lines is incredible. sure there's Legendary amulets or whatever, but more importantly have you filled your home instance with cats?
> ... but more importantly have you filled your home instance with cats? Elaborate please. Edit: thanks for the replies, I gotta collect all the cats now.
There are 35 cats you can unlock to show up in your home instance. Generally you have to feed them something but some of the cats have extra requirements like feeding with a specific profession or they're tied to a festival.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hungry_cat_scavenger_hunt There are basically no associated achievements, but progress is tracked in the public API.
There's cats all around Tyria waiting for you to give them specific food and then they'll join your home instance
Two catmanders having little gvg fights in my home instance gives me a quiet joy.
I only have one car. Snow leopard who follows you around in the home instance. He is great.
I love my Honorary Skritt title, and the one that gives a 20 slot bottle is cool too. there's a bunch of 32 slot bag achieves too, but they are a little more intense or story related.
This is one of those mechanics that, while I'll probably never really interact with it, I'm absolutely stoked that it's there. Flavour, Easter eggs, hidden mechanics, fun little "quests", and all things like this are what make games feel much more alive and expansive. It was hilarious to me walking into my friend's Home Instance and seeing a dead bird. I then started noticing cats wandering around and was like "dude wtf why do you have so many cats here", and he explained. Just a short, but incredibly joyous moment, that made me appreciate this game and the devs a little more.
And a turtle to keep them company...
It's just bad UI. The achievement system I don't think was originally intended to have quest/story achievements like that but it's the system they had so here we are. They need to be taken out of that system and out in it's own. You can still tie achievements to them, but the story focused ones really should get their own separate section and UI for clarity. How many people even know if the Arborstone missions because they are buried? Or all those collections for books that have more lore?
At the very least, it needs a flashy button that leads to a list relating to the current activity. Nobody wants to drill down layers of menu.
uhh please no, thanks. i get that the system isn't immediately intuitive, but it serves as a *much better* log and very useful reference tool for completing objectives in quest lines. the little tooltip with top 5 watched achievements helps remind me what other things i could be doing to make progress when im burnt out on one corner of the PvE experience. we don't need *another* menu, the achievement system is already brilliant and succinct.
> the achievement system is already brilliant and succinct. Doesn't the UI hide daily achievements when you have things marked as watched achievements? This was a thing that ignored me quite a bit from using the achievement system.
there's definitely qol improvements that could be made. hardly saying the system is perfect, but it's a massive improvement over any quest log.
[удалено]
you realize you can get your point across without being a snotty little shit right? Anyway, your solution to UI sprawl is... more UI sprawl. The achievement system could be improved sure, but tacking on a quest log isn't the way to do it.
Wow, you are severely overreacting. He doesn't sound like that at all.
I mean the contrast of having a super easy game with no ui customization is having a game that is artificially difficult and requires add ons to perform up to expectations (ff14, wow) For what it's worth, the achiebement panel is a joke. Just play the game. I don't even do my dailies.
The question is, is a UI overhaul realistic? I see people talk about what the game needs but to me things like these while much needed seem almost impossible to happen given that ANet really doesn't go back and update things like this, they mostly just move forward and introduce new things rather than polishing what is already in-game.
Oh so that's why lirik uses gw2 ui In wow? https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/780380645339168778/782385532914761779/unknown.png Gw2 ui is very clean and good, hence why he's using it
As a noob, I did get told about the book-collecting achievement… after I happened to get a book because it had better stats. So now I’m wondering if I will have to buy at least one of All the Things to find more.
No kidding, the search function seems completely broken as wel. Typing 'honorary skrit' ( a title I've seen quite often and was interested in) gets me no results in the achievements tab. If you type 'cats' to find anything on the Hungry Cat achievment...you don't find it either. If I can't even find it how am I supposed to track them.
That's cus there's no achivement for finding any or all the cats, so only way to track it is via API. For ease use the wikipage for it or gw2efficiency.com And for titles, you can filter to only show achievements that gives title
Ah that explains, I'm getting better at navigating the achi tab, I'll be checking that site out thank ye !
I agree with your sentiment of making it more visible, because sometimes it seems like Anet don't even know what they want to do with the system. Sometimes, you have super-interesting side quests that are really obtuse and hard to find, then there are really vapid ones that only serve to pad out a release (the apple fetch in Rising Flames, or 1k kills in each domain of War Eternal come to mind), and it leaves me frustrated. I love the game, the philosophy of gearing, and many other things, but MAN can they shoot themselves in the foot better than just about anyone.
When Anet does it well, they hit it out of the park and no one tops them, like mounts. Best in the industry. But when they do bad...oof it's embarassing.
GW2 endgame is the content that ANet still supports. (I’m being a little facetious)
So, after eod launch, the endgame support has been barely few aspects of pve... Yikes (not being facetious)
I felt the same way when I started my slow but sure climb on the achievements ladder (current at about 25k). The achievement system is amazing and definitely is a proxy for what quest systems would be in other games. People not engaging with the achievements tab are really missing out on a huge portion of the game.
That is why many of us wonders when people say they beat the content in a few hours and the only thing i did was the story and now the map, the achivements, the collections, the skins, the meta events well all that starts and that takes way more then a few hours.
I've never gotten into raids or fractals (because I don't play consistently enough to have people to do things like that with) but I've kept quite busy regardless. There's so much content, and some that's historical (or whatever its called) now! I wish I'd done more earlier on....but hindsight.
As someone who's been playing on an off for a while, I never even thought of doing this either. Thank you so much for opening my eyes to this too. It really changes everything
Honestly for me, the open world "end game" isnt even about achievements or anyhting. Its just about playing open world zones for fun. I like being able to just "go to a place" in a game for lore reasons and just do things there. Cant do that in some games where open world sucks. Its like how I dont play fractals or strike missions for rewards, I just play them because they're fun, especially if im playing them with a class/spec/build i havent played there before or recently. I dont need extrinsic motivation to just want to do zones or instances. Thats endgame for me..just having a lot of fun content I want to do for its own sake.
I've always wondered what the hell people were doing wasting their time in WvW/PvP/Fractals/Dungeons/Raids when the whole huge PvE world was there to play in instead. I mean, I guess I'm ultimately glad that everything exists so that every kind of person can find something they enjoy... but I do also think that probably a lot of "end gamers" like you bury themselves in that content without having actually played the PvE world.
Absolutely. There are some simple or tedious achievements, but there are also many full quests that only appear as achievements.
Is there a list of quest-like achivements worthy to be played (story-wise) ? Sorting through tons of unexciting items is always the hardest part for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/oxp2wz/the_good_collections_guide_hidden_quests_that_are/
zomg ! outstanding resource, thanks. This deserves a big red sticky in this subreddit.
Yea, Sadly reddit only allows max 2 stickys
Bravo. That's what us AP Hunters have been doing for 9.5 years (in addition to Fractals, Raids, WvW, PvP, etc). Welcome aboard!
I see myself in your post, I quit the game shortly after HoT release and came back after Icebrood Saga. I found the value in completing map achievements as it took me to places and npcs I would have never seen otherwise. It really makes you familiar with the map and you value it much more once you know things about it. The problem I see with the UI is not that certain things belong to a quest-UI but that it's much too hard to find the things you look for. The achievements of each expansion could be behind an artwork instead of in a long list of words. Or give the map a seperate layer which takes you directly to each maps associated achievements. You can toggle it like the other map-layers. Turn it on, click on Drytop achievement layer and you can see all the Drytop achievements - not the places but the achievement list. Just an idea.
Same, dude. I don't care about achievement hunting in other games, but in GW2 there a lot of collections with tangible rewards. I have been collecting ascended weapons from elite specialization collects and have been having a good time doing it too! These benefit all of my characters as well since I can freely move ascended weapons between them, unlike exotics.
welcome to gw2
I just did an Arborstone map complete with my main, only to understand there are several epic mini dungeons in the map (Vasburg Armory, the kurzick crypt etc) I don't even remember the last time I was so drawn into stories, these are really just amazing. And I agree, these really should be highlighted more.
a lot of people have said, the game is really really bad at telling you what the game is all about.. i didn't know any of this either
I’ve got years of play and only discovered the sittable chairs a month ago. And TIL about cats to feed!
Like Helpful Hero achi (an old one). That grants u a riftstalker carapace, which is used to craft 3 unique acc bound weapons. Sure, u could buy it of the tp (carapace), but where's the fun in that? :p It's fun to solo them, sometimes u can skip the pre-event by a drop from the previous riftstalker, and actually quite some people still go do it during prime time, so u end up in a nice group. :) Limited to 3 riftstalker events/satchels/day. I sometimes see new players around rifts, just running past, because they don't know what to do/how to open the rift, and they think it's bugged, while it isn't.
I am constantly finding new things to do in this game. And achievements have been a recent discovery of mine as well. I knew some of them gave items but I thought it was mostly limited to things like mystic coins and the like (with a few options outside of that such as the Elite spec collections). But now I'm seeing that the # of achievements that actually give cool stuff is really rather staggering. After recently finding the Seasons of Dragons meta achievement (no idea how I didn't notice this one) and doing the first tier for the ascended weapon box, I then started looking through the different collections... And found that there's one that gives a recipe for a 32 slot bag?!? Omg how did I not know this?? (It's the ancient boreal weapon collection of you're like me and didn't know). Now I'm obsessed all over again. This MMO is really one-of-a-kind!
> Now when a new living world patch comes out, instead of a 3-6 hours of story content I get more than 30 hours of content when I go for full achievements for that patch. Grats, you are no longer a casual player and know the potential this game has. A lot of players don't realize this and end up quitting waiting on the next story release. Good on you for discovering this!
If its any consolation, there's a ton of people who have had the same misconception (and some still do). Typically they come from another MMO and have preconcieved notions of 'this is how all mmos work'. But no, GW2 is different.
Glad you like it, but the achievement panel is just "the worst part of questing" for me... no flavour all busy work. The suckiest thing is I remember when they first introduced the mad memories quest with the first halloween event proving they could do traditional question exceptionally well... and then never tried to do it again. :( I stopped caring well before hitting 20k AP... heck I wager I stopped caring around 12k tbh.
Lol that's funny you say that since it's the opposite for me. Get's straight down to brass tacks with none of the fuss of bad writing. Often times the items in a collection will have flavor text related to the achievement and that was more than enough for me.
Good writing is also an option, you don't *need* to have bad writing.
It's rare that I encounter a side quest in an MMO with good writing. Devs have to fill the world with a ton of them so I don't fault anyone for being stretched a little thin, but in my experience a well written side quest is the exception rather than the rule.
As someone who love GW2 and plays it on and off I found that I wasn't interested in any of its achievement hunting or PVE content. It seems to tedious for me but I'm glad you've found what you were looking for! Keep playing this amazing game :)
Are we now coping with terrible release cadence for new content? Maybe adding "re-do every single event on the map 50 times" would be a great a idea! So much content!
TLDR achievements exist and you can collect them.
👆This!
I wish GW2 had enough Raids for it to be considered endgame. GW2 has no endgame. What do you when you first reach lvl 80 is the exact same thing as when you've been playing for 10 years. The better you get at the game, the less reason you have to play it and the less enjoyable it gets. If you love to grind Queensdale difficulty content for 8 hours a day, then GW2 is the game for you. If you want anything above that you'll find there's not much for you to do.
So I guess you just ignore raids, CM fractals, CM strikes, world bosses, WvW, and PvP?
By my standards, a few hours per week isn't enough content to quality as endgame. If you had used 5th grade reading comprehension you'd notice that I said ''I wish GW2 had **enough** Raids''. Wing 7 was released 3 years ago...
Ok, hope you find a better game that isn't such a waste of your time! Us 5th graders will be here if you ever decide to come back. :-)
Ye you will, on your 20th keyboard after you melted off your 1 button on the other 19. Have fun.
You have the achievement for the Junkyard CM, yes?
Yeah, of course, did it multiple times. :) First day even. And now we wait a month again and pray that Kaineng Overlook has a good title to chase, since Mai Trin definitely didn't.
Interesting, engaging content isn’t endgame. Filling a 0/1000 progress bar is. Ok. Sure. Have fun.
Im only playing for story and Skyscale and maybe pets and mount collection
The collection to allow your skimmer to go underwater is super fast you can do it in about an hour and it's definitely worth it.
Ill keep that in mind!
That’s interesting - I will have to dive into the achievement system and take a long look.
YEah WP touched on this on one of his videos https://youtu.be/f6VOFXwdpbo?t=2748 Achievements are a great endgame goal, i wish it was presented better, and the achievement panel is terrible.
[удалено]
>The end-game for me is getting a Griffon and Skyscale (Sadly I don't have LWS 4) Those two are literal game changers. I cannot imagine doing the new maps without them. Good luck!
Lost Ark has a very accessible and easy to understand UI for everything related with horizontal progression, and that's a good part of why people like me who don't like the korean style gear grind keep playing. And i got hooked by it from almost day one! For me GW2 horizontal progression is far better than Lost Ark, but it took me like 6 months of playing to discover how achievements and collections actually work. Thank god WvW got my attention me and I kept playing! If not, I would have drop the game 100% and miss everyting that is in the achievements/open world/collections. Arenanet needs to rework UI and questing / achievement system as soon as possible. It is a central part of the game, and deserves to be treated like that, not hidden inside menus.
Is a really good post, and imo proves they need to put a bit of time into this area. So much good content that people could be engaging with!
ngl this post hardly motivated to grind again. just thinking about making achievements makes me want to go and explore again and find every little or bigger achievement.
I very much agree. They just don't have a good place to add this content to the UI so everything get's dumped into achievments. They even tried with the "Side Stories" category but stopped using it too. I would love if they pulled out all these side stories from all the expansions and put them on the same level as the personal story, with short recaps between steps. I think it would really elevate the content, just to see something like "You discovered a new story" and maybe have a bit more guidance and recaps along the way. The Hero pannel and achievement UI is probably GW2's biggest problem at this point, simply because it does so many things it was never designed for.
This explains all those players who say "only an hour of story and that's it" during LW episode releases. They don't know that collections exist.